


love with your - dare i say forever?

by TheGoodDoctor



Series: stately progress through the stars [3]
Category: Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Gen, Multi, Parenthood, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, it is at least much less angsty than previous installments, there's just that general Vibe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:20:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22376344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGoodDoctor/pseuds/TheGoodDoctor
Summary: It falls to Bathsheba, more often than not, to listen to the farmhands and attend to correspondence and run the gig into town with examples of their produce to demand good recompense for their efforts. If the other landlords find it unusual to treat with the wife, or the workers to bring their gripes and worries to her, or the bank to receive accurate and careful statements and payments in her own fair hand, then it is not ever mentioned to her face.
Relationships: William Boldwood/Bathsheba Everdene/Gabriel Oak
Series: stately progress through the stars [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1499942
Comments: 13
Kudos: 36





	love with your - dare i say forever?

**Author's Note:**

> content warnings for brief mention of largely off-screen miscarriage. i don't believe it warrants tagging, but if i should be wrong in this i would very much like to know. i know little of what i speak; i do not intend to be anything less than accurate and respectful, but that does not preclude its possibility.

It falls to Bathsheba, more often than not, to listen to the farmhands and attend to correspondence and run the gig into town with examples of their produce to demand good recompense for their efforts. If the other landlords find it unusual to treat with the wife, or the workers to bring their gripes and worries to her, or the bank to receive accurate and careful statements and payments in her own fair hand, then it is not ever mentioned to her face.

If Gabriel hears otherwise, that is not ever mentioned, either; although upon occasion hands have remained as tenants for rather less time than either they or Bathsheba had been really expecting, and Gabriel has an odd, belligerent set to his shoulders for a few days afterwards, and Bathsheba wonders if he isn’t encouraging her workers to abandon her.

She had mentioned this to him, once, voice light and teasing as she pressed up on her tiptoes to speak the words lowly against his jaw. “ _Your_ workers, are they?” he replied in a rumble, and caught her lip gently between his teeth.

“ _Yes_ ,” she had said in a triumphant, coiling hiss, and claimed his mouth for her own, too. Gabriel denied nothing, she had noted, and there’s a peculiar victory to that, too.

She certainly doesn’t mind the excursions, head tipped proudly back as she drives smartly through the town centre. Eyes fix upon her, and likely ever will; even if the locals adjust, which they show no signs of doing, there will always be enough strangers to watch her victory parade every market day. Bathsheba doesn’t mind this, either. Let them see her, proud and powerful, safe and secure. Let the men in the market come to her for her superior produce and haggle at her feet. Let their ladies whisper behind their fans in jealous scorn.

Why should they not? Bathsheba has _earned_ this.

But in truth - which she would not tell them - she likes coming home best of all. To say so would likely make the outside world sympathise with Bathsheba in such a way as they presently do not: would make them smile, and press her hand, and offer her a chair. Would make them see her as another of the wives, eager to return to hearth and home as she ought to, when Bathsheba wants them to see her as an opponent, a rival, a force with which to be reckoned.

She doesn’t feel like it, now. Her back hurts from pulling it aggressively taut and forcing herself to stand for just as long as everyone else in the room, her stomach roils in an empty threat, and she cannot pick up the sack of grain to remove it from the gig.

“Miss?” Libby says in gentle worry, when Bathsheba does not move from the gig right away. Libby is a comfort to her, on market days, and quick with a pen. Presently, though, Bathsheba cannot help but wish that her dear little face, round and pale in the falling darkness, was attached to someone stronger, who could move the grain; Bathsheba aches at the very idea of hauling it herself, as she usually does.

Bathsheba dredges up a smile and turns it on her maid. It seems to settle her: Libby’s face smoothes like a millpond into easy calm and she hops lightly from the gig. Though not greatly separate in age, the maid seems for a moment so much younger than Bathsheba. She hasn’t been so light on her feet for two years at least, it feels like. Bathsheba will have to climb out more carefully. “You ought to get married, Libby,” she says in mild annoyance, as she ever does at times like this; and in the usual, half-scripted reply, Libby laughs.

“I promise, as soon as my prince comes calling, I shall be out of your hair, miss.”

Her laughter rings in the yard and coaxes a real, if rather tired smile from Bathsheba; better yet, it draws Gabriel out from the house, his familiar and well-worn hand already reaching out to help her from the gig as if she were a grand lady. “Mrs Boldwood,” he says, with a private smile. “You are expected, and eagerly awaited within.”

“ _We_ were eagerly awaiting a prince,” Bathsheba says, pushing her genuine pleasure at seeing him again into a light and easy tone which she cannot quite sustain alone. “But I suppose you shall have to do - will you take the grain in and join William and I in the sitting room? Libby, I shan’t need you tonight; you may go to bed, thank you.”

Libby bobs a cursory curtsey and vanishes away to her room. Gabriel inclines his head and squeezes her hand before dropping it to see to the sack. If he notes her unusual exhaustion, he does not mention it; Bathsheba is glad of that. She isn’t yet ready for the conversation doomed to follow.

Inside, the lamplight is familiar and buttery, coating her clothes with the suggestion of warmth and contriving to create the odd sensation of being held in safety from the night. Bathsheba chases her safety to its heart, pushing the door to the sitting room very gently open to observe for a moment, without being noticed, the gentleness within.

William is sprawled on his stomach on the floor, propped up on his elbows and curving his spine in the fashion of the seals that sun themselves proudly on the beach. This is not so unfamiliar as it had once been, accustomed as Bathsheba now is to returning to some similar mischief, but the sight of it is still an endearingly silly one. Imagining the Boldwood of their early acquaintance lying full-length before the fire, digging stockinged toes into the pile of the rug and making a little wooden cow dance between his fingers, is quite the task; perhaps if it had been easier, it would not have taken them so long to get here. The light catches in the silver threaded through his curls, more of it every month; his value writ larger and more precious with every month Bathsheba knows him. And he has given the same head of unruly hair to the toddler sitting before him and shaking his own wooden creature at his father, but Bathsheba needs no time to see the value in him. That had been ever evident, from the first moment he had kicked hard enough for his fathers to stumble as if the earth had shifted, pressing palms to their Marks in phantom, shared pain and looking at one another in great confusion, and then at Bathsheba, and then at the swell of her stomach. He had ever been earth-shaking, their little boy.

But Bathsheba can watch silently no more: her bones are screaming for peace, for rest, for the opportunity to sink into the armchair by the fire and never move again. Her shifting at the door has William looking up, and then breaking abruptly into a grin brighter than sunrise. “Look, darling, mama’s home from the market,” he says, voice brimming with genuine delight and excitement. Bathsheba is fairly certain that, even if she never did anything to make her son love her, he would anyway: learning joy at her approach from his father’s relentless love.

“Mama!” The toy is dropped and the boy is wriggling to his feet and storming across the room to bury his face in her skirts. “Up!” he demands, stretching his arms as high as he can and making alternating fat fists and splayed palms as if he could reach her with his arms if only he tried hard enough.

“Harry,” William says, gently stern.

“Ple-ase,” Harry sings, drawing the word out into two long syllables and turning the full, devastating effect of his large dark eyes on her. With his hair haloing wild about his head and eyes seemingly occupying half of his head he looks faintly angelic, and Bathsheba forgives him the damage he had done with chubby little fingers to her last market-day hat, and forgets for a moment her exhaustion.

There is something resoundingly _right_ about having her child on her hip, even if the effort makes her back twinge and her progression to the armchair is less elegant stride and more careful stumble; her collapse into the seat is less than graceful, but Harry adjusts his head under her collarbone so that he can press his ear to the flowers that grow under the cotton there, and it all seems rather worthwhile. “Hello, my darling boys,” she says, bestowing a tired smile on William. Bathsheba had had delusions of it being a winning, bright, and cheerful one, but the answering concern echoing back from William rather disabuses her of that. “Have we had a wonderful day?”

Harry nods against her chest but seems rather more inclined to sit still and listen than to talk himself. “We went to see the chickens again this morning,” William answers instead, putting aside his worry for a moment. “And we were very well-behaved and didn’t chase them.”

“Oh, I am very glad to hear it,” Bathsheba says, giving Harry a gentle jog in her arms to see him smile. “It’s very naughty of Papa to chase the chickens, and I’m so pleased you’re teaching him not to.”

Harry giggles as William feigns great offence. “Papa not chasing!” Harry objects around a gap-toothed grin.

“Well, good.” Bathsheba presses her smile into his hair for a moment, just to stop the joy from bursting. When she looks up again, William is watching her with a hand pressed to his mouth like he might be doing just the same. “And what else did you do?” she says, half-breathless, eyes caught in William’s expression of vast and encompassing fondness.

“We went to see Gabriel, didn’t we,” William prompts, and Harry nods.

“Sheep,” he declares with confidence. The boy puts his fingers and thumb together in a sort-of cone and taps the point against his lips, looking up with wide eyes that don’t quite meet her own to show his mother the motion.

“You had lunch up on the hill with Gabriel?” she asks, parsing the motion and its meaning, and the boy nods enthusiastically. “Was that fun?”

Harry smiles, curling back into her chest and flicking his fingers in repetitive bursting stars. “It was a little cold,” William says softly, voice gone slightly distant in remembrance, and Bathsheba watches the firelight flicker and fleck his eyes with amber. “Gabriel buttoned you into his coat, Harry, do you remember? And held you while you ate so that you would be warm and safe.”

Bathsheba swallows around a ball of some high-strung emotion. “That sounds nice,” she says, quiet in the peace and grateful for William’s gift: the vision of those she loves the best wrapped up in one another on a hilltop, well-fed and warm.

William’s eyes meet hers and he offers her a half-stunned half-smile. “It was beautiful,” he breathes, and Bathsheba cannot help but reach out and beg silently that he come nearer and sit at her feet.

He does; as soon as he is settled she pushes her fingertips into his curls and feels the vibration of his happy hum. The door creaks open and closes securely behind Gabriel, shutting the world out and her family within, and Bathsheba breathes out the last dregs of tension sitting over her shoulders. Gabriel offers them a wide smile and slides his broad palm down Bathsheba’s back as she tilts her mouth up to meet him. “Hello,” he murmurs against her lips.

“Hello,” she breathes back, and his grin widens yet further at what is, she is sure, a somewhat starstruck expression lodged on her face. Her Mark beats a pulse of joy at his hand on her back, her hand in William’s hair, their child in the middle.

Gabriel strokes Harry’s curls, unbothered by the lack of acknowledgement this earns him, and settles on the floor at William’s side. “How was the market?” he asks, leaning into William’s shoulder as William begins to work her neat black boots undone and free of her feet. It’s a relief to lose them; they aren’t uncomfortable, but Bathsheba is concerned that her ankles are swelling already with hours of upright exhaustion and the freedom is a blessed comfort.

Bathsheba rubs her eye with a knuckle. “A success,” she judges it eventually. “Which I shall tell you of tomorrow.”

William squeezes her ankle. “Alright?” he offers gently.

She rewards him for his careful solicitude with a smile which, she imagines, looks just as exhausted as she feels. “I’m simply tired, darling.”

Gabriel frowns slightly. “There’s nothing wrong? Forgive me, but ordinarily you’d have my head for carrying your grain for you.” He says it with a smile, amusement bleeding through the concern; Bathsheba smiles too, because he has never made her feel that her iron-wrought backbone of determined independence is anything less than a marvel to him. For that reason alone, she is willing to give up increments of it for them - but only for them.

She gives a one-shouldered shrug and Harry catches a strand of her hair that has frayed out of the careful pile on her head. His fingers rub over it, feeling the texture as it goes lax and taut between his hands, and Bathsheba allows him to keep it. The tug of it grounds her and holds her to him, even as vast dark wells of weariness rise up to meet her like vast black seas under unstable cliffs. “Thought you might like the work,” she deflects, and William and Gabriel let it lie.

She is only being careful, that’s all. About a year ago, she had wondered, rather absently, if her late cycle and slight fatigue might mean something. She hadn’t mentioned it. It could have been nothing, after all. No reason to go getting William and Gabriel upset and fussy for _nothing._

And it had been nothing, in the end: a rush of blood slightly heavier than usual and Bathsheba standing frozen before her home with the heavy grain sack in her hands, straining just to hold it, and thinking, _oh._

She is a little more careful now, with her possible _something._

“Will you be wanting dinner?” Gabriel offers, getting ready to stand.

Bathsheba waves him back down. “No, it’s alright. I’m not hungry - just tremendously tired.” The idea of eating turns her stomach; she will have to wait until the nausea has lessened and she can manage a little bread and soup.

“You might try resting, tomorrow,” William suggests lightly, and Bathsheba fights a scowl. This is why she doesn’t say anything: she is not frail. She is not fragile. She will not be a kept woman. “Come with Harry and I, and see if we can’t catch something in the river, hmm? How does that sound, Harry, catching fishies with mama and papa?”

Harry doesn’t respond to his name, just keeps watching his fingers move, but when Bathsheba gently extends one finger of her own and taps his palm he smiles. “Fish,” he acknowledges, and William smiles with inordinate pride. He had been worried, in those early days after Bathsheba had handed him his son, that he wouldn’t be a good father. That he wouldn’t know how, with no frame of reference from his own youth to guide him. But he has, as Bathsheba and Gabriel had known he would, done wonderfully - seemingly by taking everything he would have liked his own father to do for him, and then doing all that plus extras for his own son. For his wife and lover, too, she must admit.

Bathsheba sighs, and lets go of her fiercely guarded power with some reluctance. She must admit this, too: a rest would do her good, and the _something_ as well, and a day on the riverbank with her husband and her son is a proposal requiring little persuasion. “That does sound rather nice.” Her eyes flick to Gabriel in silent question, but he is already easy in the knowledge of his inevitable absence.

“You shall have to catch me something for my dinner, then,” he says, reaching over to wrap his palm around William’s knee and squeeze when he turns his disappointment upon Gabriel. “And think of me, working hard at the farm.”

“I wish-” William begins, almost too fast.

“I know,” Gabriel says, calm and soothing, and William settles somewhat.

But the idea of smelling fried fish has turned Bathsheba’s unsettled, empty stomach, and it is rather too much to hope that Gabriel and William will not notice her sheet-pale face and fingertips pressed carefully to her mouth. “Bathsheba?” William says, all worry tinged with fear as he presses forward onto his knees to brush her hair from her white forehead. “Dear, what is it?”

“May I have some water?” she manages, and William is already nodding and on his feet before she’s quite finished. “Harry, will you sit with Gabriel for me, please?” The boy nods and slides easily from her lap to wrap his little arms around Gabriel’s neck and bury his face there, his fingers tapping out a relentless battery against Gabriel’s shoulderblades. Gabriel’s arms come up automatically to cradle Harry to his chest but his eyes remain ever fixed in concern on Bathsheba, as if trying to scour every inch of her for the cause of her illness.

William returns with her water and perches on the arm of the chair, petting gently at her hair as she sips slowly and carefully. The sensation is pleasant, but she gets the sense that it is as comforting, if not more so, to William than to herself. His hand slides to settle on her shoulder, thumb rubbing at the leaves shawled about her collarbone, and the rolling nausea abates somewhat; enough for her to lean her head against his arm and close her eyes and just, briefly, _rest._

“Bathsheba,” Gabriel says, voice unsteady, and it so rarely ever is that it forces her eyes open. She’s half-minded to apologise. “Please. What’s wrong?”

Her eyes flutter shut again on a sigh and William’s hand slides to the nape of her neck to better cradle her head against him, leaving a broad ribbon of warmth along her skin as it moves. She hadn’t wanted to say, yet. Had wanted to be sure before telling them anything that might make them hope in case it all ends in nothing again. Harry is a gift, so precious that she hasn’t the courage to demand another, and William would certainly love another little body to pour his overflowing, treasuring affection into - but what if this something goes the way of the last? What if her insistence upon independence and freedom and hauling her own sacks of grain has robbed her - robbed them all - of another?

Her eyes are threatening her with tears so she squares her shoulders against them, as she has ever since she was a small girl and learned that weeping earns pity, but no promises. She opens her eyes, but cannot quite look them in their terrified eyes to soothe William’s lip-biting worry or Gabriel’s controlled stillness; instead, her gaze fixes unexpectedly upon Gabriel’s fingers, reaching slowly and secretly across the space between them to grip the hem of William’s trousers between the tip of his thumb and the second knuckle of his index finger. As if, under the veneer of great, calm stoicism, Gabriel is relying upon the subtle, slight comfort of clinging to William to keep him together. Harry holds on to her skirts like that, sometimes, to be with her without either of them feeling tethered. Gabriel does it as if it’s the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth at all.

“Perhaps I shall take one of the hands with me to market next month,” she tells Gabriel’s knuckles. It is hard, for some reason, to just come out with it: as if by saying so she will make it untrue. Or perhaps the opposite. It is hard, too, to say which worries her more. “That is, after all, what I did last time. Or William will have to go and I shall stay here in future.”

“Last time…?” William murmurs, confusion radiating from him.

Gabriel adjusts his grip on Harry slightly, and then breathes in sharply. “Last time,” he echoes, in a voice that clicks, dry, and he swallows hard. “Before Harry was born.”

“ _Oh,_ ” William whispers.

When she finally cannot take it any longer, Bathsheba looks up. Gabriel is watching her still, but it is as if a light has flicked on behind his eyes. He seems pleased, but - but he is waiting for her cue, she realises: for her to declare whether or not this is a moment of joy for them all. So she takes another deep breath, and says the next thing which needs saying, keeping her sharp eyes directed at Gabriel. “I think, perhaps, this one is Gabriel’s,” she says, voice deliberately steady with confidence she does not feel. 

Gabriel digests this knowledge carefully, mulling it over without any external signs of anything much at all. Harry is quite obviously a Boldwood, with his mop of wild curls and dark eyes, almost to the exclusion of looking anything at all like Bathsheba; this suits them perfectly well, as Bathsheba’s child looking a great deal like her husband is rather par for the course. Her second child looking a great deal like her estate manager will be somewhat more difficult to explain away. Gabriel knows this, but the light doesn’t flicker out again and he does not move.

Bathsheba eventually turns her head to look up at William and is rather startled to find his lips abruptly pressed to her own. Her hand flutters automatically to his sternum and the plants blossoming there, but he has pulled away again before she can engage her addled mind enough to kiss him back. “Sorry - sorry,” William says, shaking his head slightly as if to calm himself. “I didn’t mean to - I was-”

“Didn’t mean to what?” Bathsheba says with a sort of absent, confused amusement; she has, frankly, no idea what is happening inside William’s head. This had not been the expected response. "Kiss me?"

Gabriel starts, cautiously, to smile as William tries to get his thoughts in order. “I was trying to wait and make it your choice, but then-” he stops and winces. “I was rather - excited. Sorry. Go on.” Bathsheba’s fingers rise to cover her smile.

“I love you,” Gabriel says, shaking his head, a silly little grin on his face and his eyes fixed on William’s as if he is powerless to do anything else in the world.

William ducks and blushes, as he has every time either of them have said such a thing to him for almost three years, and Bathsheba melts a little more into love of him, as she has every time too. “So, William is keen,” she says dryly, to distract from her own stupefying fondness.

William grins and presses his forehead to her temple as Gabriel laughs gently. “But are you?” Gabriel says, when the moment has settled into comfortable ease once more.

Bathsheba looks at Gabriel and Harry, wrapped up together at her feet. She loves them all so much it scares her, sometimes; it’s easier to go out to do battle with hagglers than sit at home and be confronted with the awesome, terrible depths of her heart and the things it would justify in their defence. Her ruthlessness is no great surprise to her now, but the ferocity with which it defends her affection is more akin to a she-wolf standing over its den than a shrewd businessman counting costs and profits, and that terrifies her. There is the temptation to keep her heart small and confined to only that which already fits within it: to protect her vulnerable love by coiling around it and fighting away intruders upon it. She does not want to invite the possibility of loss.

But her coiling already includes this _something_ \- this baby - without her having noticeably done so. Bathsheba had not meant to make this baby into anything real, but she has; there is no changing that now.

There is still the worry, however. “I am,” she says, and William beams at her brighter than the sun. “There is only,” she says, before his delight can progress too far, “the matter of appearances.”

Gabriel nods in understanding, but William waves them off. “I care not a jot for them,” he says warmly - so warmly that Bathsheba half wonders if she hasn’t deprived him by not providing a sibling for Harry sooner.

“William,” Gabriel says, a little chiding.

“I don’t,” he says firmly, swinging his leg to press his toes into Gabriel’s thigh. Gabriel’s hand shifts from the trouser-leg grip to wrap around his calf. “If this baby is dark haired and dark eyed like Bathsheba, they shall be beautiful like their mother, and if they are blond with light eyes they shall be beautiful like their father - although, for _appearances_ -” Bathsheba cannot help a giggle at the disdain which he bestows upon the word, and Gabriel allows a pleased, slightly embarrassed smile to grace his face. “-we shall claim that they are beautiful like their mother’s aunt, or some such, and ignore all else,” William concludes with bright-eyed, delighted confidence. _All else_ may be a great deal, whose edges they have already skirted around, and Bathsheba hates William’s readiness to take the scorn of his neighbours upon himself - but if he is willing to weather it, then she cannot take the joy of their child from him. She would not, not for the world.

“It may not even be mine,” Gabriel points out, ever so gently, as if it’s nothing to him at all. Harry has shifted in his lap to make repetitive star hands against his chest and Gabriel is allowing him with perfect patience. To all intents and purposes, Gabriel is also the child’s father, and Bathsheba has never known him or William to think any differently about Harry based on the boy’s blood. Perhaps it really doesn’t matter to him - Bathsheba rather hopes it never will.

“I think it is,” she says anyway. “It _feels_ like it.” It does - in some way she can’t explain, she thinks she knows it.

“I hope it is,” William says, and Gabriel snorts at his perversity. “I do - a mixture of my two favourite people, to stay at home with me all day and care for me in my dotage.”

“You’re hardly worthy of dotage, dear,” Bathsheba says in an effort to distract herself from the encompassing joy of his statement. She takes his hand and presses it gently. “But - you really don’t mind staying at home with the children?”

William drops a kiss to her hair. “I should like nothing better in all the world,” he says gently, but with resounding conviction, “than to be the person that you two come home to.”

Bathsheba feels Gabriel shift closer, his hand sliding into her lap to wrap around their joined hands. “And what a home you make it,” Gabriel murmurs in wonderment, eyes turned large and adoring upon them.

Harry yawns enormously, shaking his little hands. “Bed,” he declares, scrunching up his enormous calf-eyes and squinting out of them at his parents.

“Well, Harry, how should you like a little brother or sister?” Gabriel asks, rubbing his broad palm up and down the child’s back as diversion from the incredible depths of affection upon whose edges they had been teetering.

Harry frowns at them in confusion and mild annoyance: he has spoken, and yet they have not moved to take him to bed. Bathsheba smiles. He may _look_ all William, may sit stiller than other children with Gabriel’s calm introspection, but there is no-one who can claim that his stubbornness is not all her own. “Bed,” he repeats, leaning his cheek into the flat of his hand and effectively ending any attempt to further discuss the matter, and William laughs.

“You’ll come around,” he says cheerfully and leans in to scoop the boy up under his arms. “It will be an excellent sibling.”

Gabriel makes a little noise in the back of his throat and fixes one hand at the back of William’s neck to hold him still, fitting their lips together with an unexpected urgency. Bathsheba watches, noting the way that Gabriel is leaning so far up as to be almost kneeling and how William’s eyelashes are long and dark against his cheek and how Harry is ignoring them both to sit between them and watch his fingers flap about in front of his face. He isn’t a normal boy: he is their baby, and Bathsheba loves him beyond the expression of words.

“Thank you,” Gabriel breathes upon their parting, and Bathsheba isn’t quite sure what for: the kiss, or his care, or the new baby, or William’s lack of jealousy, or letting Gabriel into their marriage - there are a great many things for which Gabriel and Bathsheba are grateful, and William as a whole ranks highly amongst them.

William ducks his head in an acknowledging bow and stands, propping Harry up on his hip. “I shall put you to bed, young man,” he says, “and then - shall I come back?” This last, directed at Bathsheba and Gabriel, is gentle and a touch uncertain; two years or so ago, it would have been a worry over his welcome between them. Now, he is asking something else entirely - would they like to sit about and talk, or retire upstairs to the privacy of their bedroom?

Gabriel looks at Bathsheba, in time to catch her yawn expansively, and laughs softly. “We shall follow you up to bed, I think,” he says lightly, teasing, and Bathsheba sticks her tongue out at him to make them both laugh. “But perhaps Harry isn’t the only one who needs to sleep.”

“I’ve been on my feet all day to support you layabouts,” Bathsheba grouses without venom as Gabriel gets to his feet and hauls her out of her armchair. The motion wakes a variety of previously dormant aches and pains and she winces as her spine and ankles make themselves known once more. “And me expecting, too.”

Gabriel and William pause at that and then bestow upon her such blinding beams that she has to smile back, a moon helpless but to reflect the light of twin suns. She hadn’t actually said as much in those words until then, but the Marks on their skin sing out with it. “Yes,” Gabriel says, aiming for dry but with joy unmistakable. “We’re quite terrible.”

His arm slides around her waist, hand curving over her still flat stomach. “Oh, I don’t know,” she says, leaning her head into his shoulder and reaching out to stroke a hand down William’s arm and give Harry’s dangling foot a squeeze. “I suppose it could be worse.”


End file.
